Graham Reid: Madrid train station was dizzying city of light and life

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Major stations in European capitals are like self-contained cities.

They are the axes between people's working and home lives, they provide necessities: shops, dining areas, storage and toilets.

They are meeting places for the poor and privileged alike. Tourist and local rub shoulders, some people rush through for appointments while others sit waiting for friends, relatives or simply the next train.

Such places breathe like small cities, have their own daily rhythms.

Atocha station, near the famous Museo del Prado and serving Spain's southern regions, is just such a place.

It is enormous.

It was raining and near midnight when I recently arrived in Atocha after a journey from Granada.

I got lost trying to find the exit. There were streets of lockers and shops, a bewildering array of signage, kids playing football.

I negotiated this dizzying city and finally stepped outside into the light and a large garden with tall trees.

It was alive with activity and it took me a full 20 seconds to realise that I was still inside the station. The trees, the permanent daylight, the busy ambience and shops all disguised the fact that beyond this exit lay the other Madrid, the one where it was pitch black and raining.

Because television and newspapers - which we rely on to bring us images of this current tragedy - rarely show us the bigger picture, it is hard for us to imagine the chaos that must have hit Atocha, where dozens of trains run efficiently cheek-to-cheek on parallel tracks.

It was morning rush hour when the bombs went off. The rising toll of dead and injured reflects just how busy it must have been at that time.

In our mind's eye we must try to pull our camera back, to take in that larger picture of ordinary people - workers and commuters, labourers and business people in their corporate uniforms - who were there at the moment terror struck.

These were people doing what we all do so often in the course of our lives: going to work, passing through a station, waiting for friends or trying to negotiate through the press of humanity that a city like Atocha contains. They would have known the city of Atocha like they would know their local street.

To fully appreciate the magnitude of the attack we must imagine the unimaginable: Death arriving by train one morning like an ordinary commuter.